


this dream isn't feeling sweet

by moodmaker



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Coming of Age, Growing Up, M/M, Teen Romance, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:28:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23503864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodmaker/pseuds/moodmaker
Summary: Because he's flashing back to Chenle's voice over the phone a week ago, hollowed out but still loud with righteous anger.Do you really even know anyone, Jisung?I know you,he'd wanted to say.Isn't that enough?(Or: Jisung takes on his senior year of high school, the right-wrong way.)
Relationships: Park Jisung/Zhong Chen Le
Comments: 48
Kudos: 239
Collections: dream jukebox fest: round one





	this dream isn't feeling sweet

**Author's Note:**

> a huge thank you to mod jump for being so patient and kind with me, and for running dream jukebox! i finally got to write for this song which was an extremely intimidating yet rewarding experience. thank you also to di for holding my hand through all of my endless breakdowns—couldn't have done it without you, my one and only 4ever constant <3
> 
> set in america, written for and title from ribs - lorde

Jisung sprawls out on the back deck of Mark's house, nearly cracking his head open after a meet-cute with the barbecue grill leaning up against the railing. He’s drunk off of a Bud Light—yes, one singular Bud Light, yes, a Bud Light, which is the kind of thing that you can drink even at prom because it won’t set off the breathalyzers they have to take when they leave, and yes, Jisung is aware that his tolerance is shit.

Still, even if the beer is warm and his t-shirt is useless against the September chill, this isn't a bad way to end the summer. It's gotten so dark out that it looks like someone's taken a hole puncher to the sky, this big black screen of nothingness shattered by light. In the distance the pool leers cyan, music pours out of the sliding door, and crickets fight to make themselves heard. Three hours ago he'd been trying to hack into Chegg so he could finish his physics problem set. Getting buzzed is already a significant improvement.

"There you are."

The tone is just reproachful enough to make Jisung lift his head and check, mentally apologizing for the way his stomach rumbles in protest. His eyes take a moment to adjust even though all of the lights are off except for the ones in the kitchen. Jaemin's standing by the sliding door, too backlit for Jisung to tell what expression he's making, but it can't be anything good.

"What do you want," Jisung slurs.

Jaemin shrugs and reaches to slide the door shut, eyes crinkling slightly even if he isn't outwardly smiling. "This is your definition of a party? Crashing at nine, after one drink?"

Jisung rolls his eyes but lets it slide. Before coming he'd considered pregaming with the watered-down sangria he and Chenle had found buried in the back of his parents' wine cooler, but currently Chenle was stuck at home slaving over Shakespeare and would be for the foreseeable future. It didn't feel right to open that bottle without him. Now though, as Jaemin stares at him a little too seriously to just be talking shit about his tolerance, Jisung kind of wishes Shakespeare could fuck off.

"This is why I said you should've been DD," Jaemin says, prodding at his side and waiting with his foot hanging in the air until Jisung makes room for him. "You're not even going to properly drink."

"School starts up tomorrow." In the background, Jisung can hear Yukhei yelling for someone to play some real music already.

"So?"

He resists the urge to whine, still too accustomed to doing aegyo for Jaemin when they'd carpooled to Korean school together five years ago. "Give me a break."

A slow, lazy smile stretches across Jaemin's face, akin to how Donghyuck had looked when Jeno last made the mistake of wearing Speedos to practice. Inside the house something shatters, but the ensuing chaos all sounds so muted. The headlights of a passing car illuminate them briefly, just enough for Jisung to see Jaemin's eyes. They almost look fond. "Senior year, huh?"

Jisung snorts. "You say that like it was years ago."

"Sure feels like it."

Jaemin turns over suddenly, propping his head up as he stares down at Jisung. "Look," he says, and he's looking at Jisung again in the way that he does, like he could dissect and categorize each one of Jisung's organs perfectly. "I'm not saying you need to feel like you're losing time as it comes," Jaemin leans back on his elbows, attention caught briefly by a moth flitting near the sliding door, "but it goes by fast. Nine months is shorter than you think."

"What," Jisung snorts, "you're getting nostalgic now that you're finally off to college? Are you sure I'm the one who's drunk?"

"I'm serious," Jaemin says softly, eyes lost on the horizon line. "You're gonna miss this."

And maybe there's something to be said about the way Jaemin turns back toward him, movements unfolding slowly in a clumsy tableau, face tinted indigo in the dying light. In the distance a siren blares and somewhere in the back of his head Jisung knows he'll have to remember these words, this moment. 

He's too drunk for this.

"Which section are you in for AP Lit?"

"B," Chenle says, not bothering to look up from his phone. His hair is already unfurling slowly at the edges, coming undone from whatever amount of gel that had been slathered on this morning. Chenle's mom takes picture day very seriously. Back in ninth grade Jisung had dressed up too, in solidarity, but Donghyuck had twisted his hair into pigtails when he wasn't looking and Jisung had gone around the rest of the day like that without knowing. Thankfully Chenle hadn't minded when he'd showed up to the first day of sophomore year in shorts again.

"I'm in A." He makes a face. "I can't believe we don't have anything together. Not even homeroom! This is worse than when we took Driver's Ed one week apart."

"Well," Chenle shrugs, closing his locker with a smile. "At least there's always lunch?"

"Yeah," Jisung's saying, but he's already thinking about the rest of the year. He does swim and Chenle's on newspaper. Their paths aren't going to cross anytime soon.

"Hey," Chenle knocks his elbow against Jisung's. "We'll make it work. We always do."

"I guess."

Chenle rolls his eyes with a huff. "There's no need to get all emo, alright? What is this, middle school?"

"Shut uppp," Jisung moans, "you said you wouldn't bring that up anymore! Do I need to remind you of your obsession with—"

Chenle slaps a hand onto his mouth, beaming at a passing teacher who briefly raises her eyebrows in concern. He lets it drop when they're past. "Point taken."

"And?"

"Fuck off," Chenle shoves him into the wall, hard, but he's grinning as he does it. "Go fail calc or whatever."

One of the worst things about living in a small town is the gossip—when you can map literally every other family you see on the street onto some sort of convoluted ancestry tree, it’s hard to keep things quiet. Jisung has a KakaoTalk, he's heard the whispers at the New Years’ parties, he knows how brutal it gets. Still, he hadn't expected to be dealing with so much of it himself.

Take, for example, last Friday at the grocery store. Jisung hadn’t really needed to be there, but anything was better than actually outlining his paper on _The Tempest_ —which was truly too dull to not be considered cruel and unusual punishment—so he’d agreed to tag along when his mom asked. He’d been left standing in line with his mom’s credit card and strict orders to keep their spot at any cost while she went to pick up whatever she’d forgotten earlier, so he’d been effectively trapped when the woman in line just ahead of him turned around to strike up a conversation with him.

"I almost didn't recognize you, you've gotten so tall!" She'd smiled in greeting, but Jisung had had to stifle the _well I don't recognize you_ that threatened to come out of his mouth. "How are you? How's senior year treating you?"

He twisted his grip on the shopping cart. "Um, good. Busy."

"Mmm," she'd said, eyes daydream glossy, and Jisung got the distinct feeling that she wasn't really all that interested in what he was saying.

"Do you miss any of your friends? I know you and Jaemin are close… you guys used to always have playdates after Sunday service."

Ah. So she went to their church.

"Not really," he shrugged, rubbing at the back of his neck. A glance at his watch told him it'd been eight minutes. How long did it take to grab another carton of milk?

She flipped open the cover of her phone case, nails clacking loudly on the screen as she typed. Jisung winced a little at the sound. "Last year's class did really well, right? I heard Renjun got into an Ivy."

"Uh, yeah." Renjun had pretended like it wasn't a big deal the next day at school, but his mom had filmed his reaction and he'd sobbed like he was the second lead in a C-list drama. Jisung knows, because he'd watched the video over Chenle's shoulder.

"That's impressive." She snapped her phone shut the same way that Jisung used to slam his head against his SAT books. "So, where are you looking at?"

And there it is. The inevitable question, the near-perfect constant of every high school senior’s life, the one unchanging variable in the period of their lives where the greatest number of variables were changing. Jisung’s gotten this question a million times and he still doesn’t know how to answer it.

The problem is, he’s not looking at any _school_ in particular—he’s looking at places. People. Culture. Right after he’d passed his road test in junior year he’d bought himself one of those cheap laminated maps off of Amazon, sticking it to the back of his door with thumbtacks that he’d pilfered from the school bulletin board and circling each city with a population of at least five hundred thousand in red Sharpie. San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington D.C.… he’s never been to any of them, but he imagines their broken glass skylines sometimes, their pulsing subway heartlines.

When he’d met their school’s one college counselor for the first time, he’d left the office a little numb. Obviously there’s only so much that they can do when 90% of them will wind up at their local state school anyway, but Jisung hadn’t truly realized how much work he’d have to do if he wanted to go anywhere other than here.

“I don’t get why you care so much,” Chenle had said a couple of weeks later by the pool, legs dangling back and forth off of the diving board. He hadn’t been wearing a swimsuit underneath and yet he’d still inched steadily closer to the edge.

“Haven’t you noticed that—” Jisung had twisted his body around so that he could actually see Chenle, “everyone here goes through this like, constant cycle?” He wiped his hands onto the dock beneath him, accidentally smearing an ant in the process. It stains on his fingertips like an overripe blackberry. “They’re born here, they live here, they die here, and then that’s—” He rinsed his hands in the lake, trying to get the dead ant off. “That’s just it,” he’d said over the sound of the water splashing. “They spend their whole lives in this suburban shithole, and then they go on to have children who do the same thing over and over and over again.” His voice had been steadily increasing as he got more worked up. He’d sucked in a deep breath, watching the way Chenle’s muscles flexed as he tried to stay balanced, and let it all out in a _whoosh_. “And that’s so sad.”

"Depends on your point of view," Chenle had hummed. "I don't know, I don't think it’s so bad. At least to me."

In the background Jisung could vaguely hear the sounds of an incoming group of campers. “I think,” he’d started carefully, and then paused when Chenle turned to look at him, eyes shaded blue in the glare of the sun, “that this town isn’t for me.”

The thing is, Jisung can read Chenle pretty well. He’s all loose limbs and wide eyes to Jisung’s narrow squint and hunched posture, has the kind of easy openness that new students would naturally be drawn toward during orientation (though there isn’t really a need for that when your school gets an average of 0.4 new kids a year). Like that time in seventh grade when they’d been invited to their first real party at Taeyong’s, who everyone sort of nursed a hero worship crush on until he moved away to New York. During two truths and a lie Chenle’s turn had been the only one that _everyone_ got right.

Because that’s just how Chenle is: unapologetically vulnerable to a fault, heart not just on his sleeve but on his face and his hands and his eyes too. Jisung watched him flash through expressions like casino slots until his face shuttered in on itself, just briefly enough for Jisung to see it.

“Okay,” he’d shrugged, and hopped off the diving board.

And Jisung doesn’t realize that he’d been pulled back to that summer, when he spent his days alternating between crashing in Chenle’s basement at ungodly hours of the morning because their eyes had been blue-lighted into submission by video games and sitting at his kitchen table willing his college essays to write themselves, until the woman clears her throat and the grocery store flashes back into view. He blinks, blearily.

“So?”

“I’m actually—” Jisung frowned, not really sure how he should answer. “I don’t know, at the moment—”

“Sorry I took so long!” A new voice cut in and Jisung had turned around to see his mom, finally back from the dairy section. She’d taken over from there.

Because the questions still come, and his mom isn’t always around to save him from answering them. College is the only _happily ever after_ that their town talks about, ever, and each graduating senior class falls victim to it year after year. 

Jisung’s not willing to do the same.

So, yeah. 

Here's the thing: Jisung's watched the movies. He's heard the songs, read the books, seen his friends go through it all—real life is never as sepia-toned as they say it'll be, and high school is no different.

Especially not now, when Jisung's actually in danger of failing calc.

"You jinxed me," he huffs when he sets his lunch tray down in the seat across from Chenle. The one perk of going to school in the middle of literal Nowhere is that their buildings are huge, and thus Jisung never has to worry about saving seats or beating the lunch rush when they have more tables than students.

Chenle barely glances up from his phone. "What now?"

“I just got a 32 on that last test,” he groans, tearing open his packet of oyster crackers. “I’m actually going to fail, and it’ll be all your fault. Midterms already kicked my ass—my grade is beyond dead at this point.”

Chenle shakes his head but sets his phone down and slides his pudding cup onto Jisung's tray anyway. "It's calc. Everyone fails calc. It's only natural."

"Not Renjun."

“Renjun’s—” Chenle waves a hand disparagingly, like he’s trying to bat away some particularly persistent fruit fly, “—a freak of nature. He doesn’t count.” He pauses and points his spoon at Jisung accusingly. “Do you wanna hear about a _real_ crisis?”

Jisung crosses his arms. "My problems are real crises!"

"Okay," Chenle laughs, "whatever you say."

Chenle has this habit of stretching his legs out onto the seat in front of him, which Jisung only knows because nine times out of ten, he’s the one sitting in the seat in front of him. “Anyway,” Chenle starts, after he’s knocked his feet into Jisung’s knees again, “I was in the computer lab for layout this weekend because the freshmen still don’t know how to do a spread, right? So I’m working on all of these InDesign pages and fixing all of their spacing and whatnot, and I go to save it—”

“And?”

"And it just fucking crashes on me!" Chenle stretches his arms out wide, like they’re back in sixth grade science and measuring their wingspan in science class. "So I have to go back in tonight to re-fix everything." He stabs aggressively at his broccoli. "I hate technology, so much."

"Tonight?" Jisung repeats.

"Yeah, why?"

"Tonight's movie night."

Chenle smooshes his head onto the table. "Oh shit," he says, except his words come out warbled. "You're right. You're soooo right."

"I always am," Jisung snorts.

"Look—" Chenle sweeps a hand through his hair, Jisung's eyes drawn toward the movement involuntarily, "you know I have to make these stupid edits. Otherwise admin's never going to get off my case about it."

"As if anyone around here even reads the paper."

"I know, right?" Chenle rolls his eyes. "We can do movie night next week, promise."

Except the week before Jisung had swim practice, and the week before that Chenle had a group project, and the week before that Jisung had had to work on college essays. High school has this way of pushing people apart without them even noticing it. It’s the same way that Pangaea fractured: he and Chenle sit on different plates, and there’s nothing to carry them toward each other again except the tide.

“Really,” Chenle’s saying, reaching out to grab at Jisung’s hand. “We’ll make it work.”

Jisung first met Chenle in kindergarten, when Chenle had mistaken him for Renjun from behind and babbled Chinese at him the entire day. It'd been partly his fault, since he'd been the one who had pretended he understood and nodded in all the right places, but it’d still stung to see Chenle's appropriately scandalized face at the end of the day when he'd realized that Jisung had been lying the whole time. He got over it soon enough when he realized that Jisung was the only other kid in ESL with him, and slowly Jisung had learned to get over it too.

That was the nice thing about being young: friends slipped into your life like souvenirs, easily lodged into some discrete corner gone unnoticed before, and at some point either housed there for good or tossed out for something new. Chenle and Jisung weren't put into the same kindergarten class but they converged for ESL at 1PM every day, and soon 1PM to 2PM ESL classes became 3PM to 6PM playdates after school and 8AM to 3PM school days and 12AM to 12AM summer vacations.

Jisung’s never really considered himself a lucky person—he’s been stuck in this zip code his entire life, with the same people he’s known since preschool, and he’d been right there when Chenle had first been asked to homecoming.

(His mom would disagree about the luck thing, on account of South Korea placing 4th in the World Cup only a couple of months after he’d been born, but what does that say about him if his luck is only applicable to his soccer-player counterpart?)

Because Chenle might be the one person that Jisung spends more time with than family, but he knows it probably isn’t true the other way around. Chenle's too bright and charming and endearing to have gone unnoticed for long, even if his English had been subpar at the start, and Jisung had watched from the side as the baby fat melted from his cheeks over the years and he went blond in a heat-of-the-moment decision. The summer before middle school he'd suddenly shot up half a foot in height, and every girl in town simultaneously decided that Chenle Zhong wasn't that weird Chinese kid who'd cried after someone tricked him into trading away his best Pokémon but the guy whose name you doodled hearts around in math class. Jisung never stood a chance.

The first girl who'd mustered up the courage to ask had been Chaeryeong Lee, and Jisung's stomach had dropped because he used to be friends with her. Her mom still sent them her extra kimchi jeon during Seollal when she would accidentally make too many the day before, and they used to sit next to each other in Korean school. Back then Chaeryeong had never looked twice at Chenle.

"It's okay if you say no," she'd murmured into her hair, tucking it to the side when she realized what she was doing. Behind her, Jisung could make out the outlines of three other girls, huddled against the lockers and sneaking occasional glances at them. "I won't be too hurt."

Chenle had pushed himself off of the wall, hand coming up almost automatically to scratch at the back of his neck. “Sorry,” he’d said, face so pink it’d reminded Jisung of the way the soft underbellies of shrimp slowly steamed color, and that had been the end of it. Chaeryeong wound up going to homecoming with Daehwi Lee, Ryujin Shin had shot Chenle the occasional glare from behind her history textbook, and things had gone back to being as close to normal as they could've been.

Except that wasn't really true, because even though Jisung had watched that same scene play out in front of him again and again and again over the next few weeks, Chenle had wound up coaxing him into ditching homecoming in favor of the newest Mario game.

“Why do you turn everyone down?” He’d asked late at night, when the screen had gotten stuck on the loading page and they couldn’t do anything about it except sit around and wait.

Chenle had put down the controller to look at him, face outlined in blue, and Jisung's eyes had been so tired that for a moment Chenle's eyes had been superimposed onto his mouth. Jisung had blinked to clear his vision.

"I'm not interested in any of them," he'd shrugged, refusing to meet Jisung's eyes. “It doesn’t really seem fair when I don’t feel the same way.”

"Then," Jisung swallowed, cellophane heart in his throat. "What—what about me?"

Chenle had let out a dry laugh, a low sound that almost blended in with the lobby music playing in the background. "I'm _most_ interested in you."

 _And what the hell does that mean,_ Jisung had wanted to ask, but the screen had finally loaded, and then Chenle had been too busy shouting about which character he wanted to pay Jisung any mind.

The year after that Chenle went to homecoming with Minjoo Kim. Jisung faked the flu and stayed home.

Early decisions start trickling in over the next couple of weeks. Yuri Jo gets into some place in England, but that's about it. Jisung's never heard of the school before, though it doesn't really matter—all he can think about is just how far away England is from their town, the same suburban fairy tale that's been playing on repeat in the back of his head for the last nine months. He hadn't bothered looking anywhere abroad because his mom had sat him down back in May and told him that they couldn't afford it, but as he logs onto his portal on December 15th and sees _the admissions committee has completed its early deliberations and has deferred a decision on your application until the spring,_ he kind of wishes he had.

"It's not like that was your last chance," Chenle points out, sucking on a popsicle that he'd stolen out of Jisung's fridge even though it's the middle of winter. A drop slides down the side of his finger. "You still have regulars."

Jisung slumps onto his bed. "I know, but I wanted to be done." He looks at Chenle. "Like how you're already done. That must be so nice."

"Okay, but I'm staying here." Chenle folds his arms, popsicle stick thrown aside. It'll leave a mark on his desk later but Jisung doesn't really mind. "You're the one who wants to go somewhere else, so you'll have to put in more work for it." He shrugs and takes a sip from his water bottle. "That makes sense."

"I hate it when even you're right."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean!" Chenle squawks, and Jisung buries his face in his pillow to hide his smile.

"It means you need to get out of here, loser, so that I can actually do all these apps," Jisung says, pushing Chenle out the door before he gets the chance to protest. "You said it yourself, didn't you? Sayonara, and all that jazz. I'll see you tomorrow."

_You know,_ Chenle texts him later that day, _i'm kind of glad you didn't get in. Is that mean to say?_

Some part of Jisung's chest clenches, tight, as if he was trying to keep himself from falling out of his own body.

_Yeah, it is. Forget it, you'll never see these texts anyway._

And then their chatroom goes blank.

Over winter break, Jisung's family usually makes the six hour trek out to their nearest ski slope, or they fly back to Korea to visit family. Jisung's never minded either one, but now there isn't really a choice: he has a whole slew of application essays to write. They'd been saving up for a new car anyway, so his mom tells him not to worry about how the college process is ruining literally every aspect of his life—including their vacation—but Jisung still can't help but feel guilty.

Like how on the first Friday of break, the snow was finally starting to let up and the sky was this glorious shade of blue, the kind that made him want to sprawl out onto some lawn and plug his headphones into a song, never mind that it was twelve below freezing and he still had seventeen essays to go. Chenle, at least, had gotten to spend the day playing basketball.

“I never see you anymore,” Chenle groans into the phone later that night, voice pitched higher from the static.

Jisung's crashed onto the couch downstairs, too tired to walk all the way up to his room. That's how he's been ending most of his nights these days. His phone crackles to life again as he speaks. "And who's fault is that?"

“Yours!” Jisung lifts his head, mentally imagining the pout on Chenle’s face. “You’re always holed up inside.” There’s a crash somewhere in the background and Chenle yells out to his mom that he’s fine, though it comes out all echoey through the phone. “I get why, it’s not your fault colleges want so many essays, but—I don’t know. I thought you’d change, you know?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Chenle lets out a long sigh, except it comes out stifled, as if Jisung wasn’t supposed to hear it. “Even Renjun wasn’t as obsessed with leaving as you are.”

Jisung gets up and winces at how his back cracks in the process, pressing his phone up against his ear as he turns off the speaker. “So?”

“I don’t know, don’t you find it funny?” Chenle laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “You shit on this town, so much, but you’re never going to be able to change where you’re from. That’s just how it is. And,” he continues, voice quivering slightly, “it sucks that you’ve decided to cut us all out of your life just because you think you’re so much better than everyone else—”

“That’s not true, you know that’s not true—”

“How?” Chenle’s voice cracks, but he pays it no mind. “How do I know that, when all you talk about is how you can’t wait to get out of here? You waste all of this energy on just—just _hating_ everything that you never bother to pay attention to anything!”

“Yes I do!” Jisung protests.

“Okay, then—then what’s Hyejoo’s younger sister’s name?”

“Um, Yeojin?”

“Hyejoo doesn’t have a younger sister,” Chenle huffs out, exasperated. “See? This is what I mean. You spend all your time holed up by yourself. And it’s just—really sad to see.” After a moment Chenle’s speaking again, voice softened around the edges, like he’s afraid he’ll scare Jisung away. “Look, just forget I said anything—”

“Well,” Jisung cuts in, trying to swallow around the lump in his throat. “Maybe it’s good then, that we’ll be going to different schools in the fall.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath, and Jisung’s about to double-check if Chenle hung up on him, until he hears—

“You really think so?”

“…Yeah.”

“Okay.” Chenle says, quiet, but his words are clipped at the ends. “Good luck with your applications, Jisung.”

And then the line goes dead.

Before they'd all left for winter break, Jeongin had told them that his parents were going to be out of town the weekend right before New Year's and that they were all invited to his, a kind of _last hurrah!_ moment before they all inevitably got sucked back into the humdrum of school.

Jisung stays home, texting Jeongin a sad face when the other asks him where he's at, and spends the rest of his night curled into his bed. Originally, the plan had been for Jisung to drive him and Chenle over together, because he can't drink anyway and Chenle never bothered to schedule his road test. When he'd asked, though, if Chenle still needed a ride the other had sent back a curt _I'm going with Felix_ and that had been that.

FOMO works in funny ways. Like how Jisung doesn't even use Snapchat, just keeps it on his phone because Chenle likes to send their joint Bitmojis to his parents as explanation of his whereabouts, and yet Jisung still can't stop himself from spending the rest of the night watching everyone's stories religiously.

Because as each ten-second clip loads, he's flashing back to Chenle's voice over the phone a week ago, hollowed out but still loud with righteous anger. _Do you really even know anyone, Jisung?_

 _I know you,_ he'd wanted to say. _Isn't that enough?_

But sitting here, downing the sangria that he’d planned on opening with Chenle, going through these stories for the fourth time, it’s starting to hit him just how much everyone has changed over the years. Guanlin got a septum piercing, Beomgyu started commuting to the city every weekend for dance competitions, Yerim dyed her hair purple… Jisung knows that distilled like this, onto the highlight reel of a halfway-decent party, these moments are so much brighter than they seem. In reality they're likely all huddled around the folding tables in Jeongin’s basement, watching Taehyun destroy Hueningkai in beer pong yet again, but as Chenle's face flashes onto each snapshot Jisung can't help but feel like he's been doing high school wrong, all this time.

For the first time in his life Jisung commits the ultimate social faux pas of prepubescent teenhood: he sits alone during lunch.

And he wishes he could say that he was doing it as some of backwards celebration for finally reaching senior spring, some kind of _fuck you!_ to the specific brand of peer pressure that had once ruled everyone's lives, whether they liked to admit it or not, but no. The truth is that Jisung's alone because Chenle had ditched him for Felix, who he'd hit it off with at Jeongin's the night before.

He's been doing a lot of things alone these days, like: walking home early before the streetlights are turned on, pausing at the intersection of his street and Chenle's to watch the cars go by like they used to when they were younger. They'd made a game out of seeing who could spot the most interesting license plate, and more often than not Chenle won because he actually had good vision. Jisung manages to pick one out that hails all the way from Florida and is in the middle of taking a picture until someone honks at him, and then he snaps himself out of it.

Or: fumbling through math problems when it's late at night and he can't help but feel this niggling urge to keep trying in class, even though everyone else has long since stopped caring. His desk is the emptiest it's been in months now that there's only one set of textbooks on it. He does the same worksheets over and over and over again, until his brain feels like it's been blended into one of those NutriBullet smoothies that Chenle's mom drinks in the mornings. He'd text Renjun for help, but he'd only ever really known Renjun peripherally through Chenle. It'd be weird to reach out now, on his own.

And even: turning eighteen on a Monday, which is arguably the worst day of the week to do so—though it doesn't really matter when there isn't anyone around to celebrate with him. His mom's working late, so he goes down to the convenience store and buys himself a Coke, two bags of chips, and a lottery ticket. The cashier smiles at him as she rings everything up, but it's a little sharp around the edges, like she's thinking _wow, you're really gonna spend your eighteenth like that?_

 _Yeah,_ Jisung thinks as he sits on the curb, typing out a string of jumbled keysmashes to Chenle that he ultimately decides against sending, _I really am._

Like every other inevitable thing, decision day creeps up on him faster than he expects it to.

Jisung scrambles for his laptop at 7:03PM, signing into his portal just as the _Status Update_ email dings at the sidebar of his notifications, and—

He gets in.

He gets in, which is— _holy shit,_ he has to refresh the page about a million times before he can really start to believe it, but it's real. He's in.

And he'd always known, in the back of his head, that if everything went right there had to be some point in time where his mom would drive him to the airport one last time, and that he'd leave this place, for good. In his head it's always been this glorious movie moment, one where the orchestra swells and the cymbals crash and there's this sense of something completely new, something bigger, of all the many lives he could lead in the city where no one knew his name or face or embarrassing childhood past and he could reinvent himself entirely each and every day. He should be looking forward to it. He _has_ been looking forward to it.

But in reality Jisung slumps further into his desk chair as he thinks of next August, and it just feels like a soda gone flat, a bag of chips exploded in an airplane, the look on Chenle's face when he'd scraped both of his knees on the asphalt falling off of his bike and made Jisung piggyback him home, never mind the way Jisung's heart had pitter-pattered in his chest all the way back—and Jisung realizes, maybe a little too late, that he doesn't want things to change.

Not the way they walk home from school together to look at the license plates of passing cars, not the way Chenle makes Renjun explain each math problem to him over FaceTime as their combined textbooks threaten to crowd Jisung off of his own desk, and especially not the way Chenle's eyes light up when he swipes frosting onto Jisung's face on his birthday, one each for the number of years he's turning. These things have already changed, but it isn't too late—at least, Jisung hopes it isn't—for him to make it right.

He sprints down the stairs, grabs the car keys hanging by the front door, yells out an explanation to his mom, and starts driving to Chenle's. By the time his brain has caught up to his body, he's already knocking on the front door.

"What—oh."

Chenle's wearing an old t-shirt from a summer camp that they'd used to go to together, rubbing blearily at his eyes, as if he can't believe Jisung's here. His hair sticks up in four different directions and Jisung has to clench his hands into fists to keep himself from reaching out and smoothing it down.

"I'm going to LA next year." The words are still hard to say. "I—I got in."

"Oh." Chenle blinks, slowly, and his face steels ever so slightly. "That's far. Congrats." He moves to shut the door, but Jisung grabs at it before he can get all the way there.

"What," Chenle exhales slowly, not really a sigh. "What now, Jisung."

"I just—wanted to let you know that I didn't really mean that," he starts carefully, trying not to forget anything he wants to say. "When I said that it's good we're not going to school together next year. Because it's not, and—" he feels his vision going hazy and his voice gets softer than he means it to. He shakes his head furiously, as if that'll make the tears go away. "I just… wanted you to know."

Chenle's face crumples. "I do know, but it still hurt. I didn't mean to yell at you either, but I guess I'm—scared." He plays with the hem of his shirt, refusing to meet Jisung's eyes. "I'm really proud of you, LA is going to be great, but you'll be all the way over there," he pauses to wipe at his eyes, "and I'll just be here."

"I know," Jisung rushes to say, "but I'll be back for breaks and there's still all of summer—"

"No, Jisung," Chenle says forcefully, shaking his head. "You don't get it. I like you, so much, but you're going to go off to LA and find a whole new group of friends who are way cooler and smarter and better than me, and I'll have to pretend like everything's okay every time you come back to visit, if you ever do." He finally looks up at Jisung, eyes rimmed red, and continues in a watery voice, "someday you'll forget about me, and I'll forever be that dumb kid from the middle of nowhere who you used to know, way back when."

"Stop," Jisung interrupts. His chest feels tight, heart beating into overdrive, fingertips buzzing. "Don't say that about yourself."

Chenle hiccups out a laugh. "What? It's true."

Jisung takes a deep breath. "I like you too," he says, trying to smile through the tears that are running down his face, "and I don't think I could forget about you, ever, even if I tried."

Chenle doesn't say anything, just blinks, and Jisung starts to worry that Chenle hadn't even heard him. "It's okay, if you don't feel the same—"

"Promise?" Chenle whispers, taking a step out the door.

Jisung reaches out for him halfway, cups his face and tilts it upward to press their lips together.

"Promise," he says, when he lets go.

And Chenle's answering smile is so, so bright.

Graduation is a teary affair, much more than Jisung had expected it to be—Chenle blubbers all over the sleeves of his cape halfway through the ceremony even though his mom had told him not to, and Jisung takes a million photos despite crying just as hard.

Summer looms ahead of them, this perfect haze of freedom where everything seems so bright and clear. Chenle will leave tomorrow for China, just for two weeks, but they work it out—Jisung's going to actually start using his Snapchat, for one.

Over the rest of the break they're going to road trip down to the beach, now that Chenle's finally gotten his license, and they'll spend their days surfing even if neither of them know how to. Chenle's promised to show him how to catch crabs and make dumplings, and at night they'll sit on the shore making up names for the stars they see in the sky instead of talking about how at the end of August Jisung will leave for Los Angeles and Chenle will stay in their sleepy little town. The next time they'll see each other after that will be in December, when Jisung comes home for winter break.

But that all seems so impossibly far away. For now, Jisung sits on the curb outside of his driveway, waiting for Chenle to come pick him up. Jeongin's promised a repeat of New Year's, and this time he'll be going.

"Hey, Jisung."

He lifts his head to find Jaemin standing at the edge of the sidewalk. He's a little taller, a little tanner—college did him well, Jisung guesses.

He reaches over to shut his phone off. "Hey," he waves back.

"Is school out for the year?" Jaemin asks, taking a seat next to Jisung on the curb.

"We just came back from graduation."

"Wow," Jaemin whistles. "Survived the last year, huh? How'd it go?"

Across the street a dog barks, briefly cutting the silence that falls. "Well," Jisung says, not really sure how to begin. "It... it went."

Jaemin smiles at him, and it's not the kind of smile he uses when he's helping old ladies carry their bags at the supermarket, but Jisung feels warmed by it all the same. "Any regrets?"

Jisung shakes his head, making eye contact with Chenle as he ambles up the street in his mom's car. "No," he tells Jaemin sincerely, keeping his gaze on Chenle. "I don't."

**Author's Note:**

> please let me know what you thought and/or find me here! ⟶ [twitter](https://twitter.com/mythsick) / [cc](https://curiouscat.me/dedication)


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